“When to trust your gut” by Alden M. Hayashi is very insightful. Here are some parts from the article that I marked.

“How do you make your most crucial decisions – those with so many variables that they demand more than rational analysis? Like many executives, you may rely on gut instinct. The more complex your decisions – and the less time you have to examine all options – the more you may depend on intuition, hunches, professional judgment.

Rarely a cold, analytical process, decision making does depend, in part, on gut feelings. But we use intuition in different ways. Some executives say hunches guide them in early phases of decision making, when they’re subconsciously filtering numerous possibilities quickly, until their conscious minds can make good choices. Others use their gut in later decision-making phases – after reviewing mounds of already analyzed quantitative information. The numbers may look terrific, but it’s intuition that suggests whether a deal is promising or dubious.

While instinct coupled with analysis may make a powerful decision-making combination, beware intuition’s pitfalls. Often, your gut is just plain wrong – because it’s subject to biases. For instance, we usually overestimate our abilities – failing to get feedback on our decision-making mistakes, and therefore not learning from them. And we conveniently forget about the times when trusting our guts led to poor decisions.

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